1. Technical Field
This invention is directed toward a system and method for obtaining a high-resolution image of a whiteboard or other object. More specifically, this invention is directed toward a system and method for obtaining a high-resolution image of a whiteboard or similar object with a low-resolution camera.
2. Background Art
The many advances in technology have revolutionalized the way meetings are conducted. For instance, many knowledge workers attend meetings with their notebook computers. Additionally, many meetings nowadays are distributed—that is, the meeting participants are not physically co-located and meet via video-conferencing equipment or via a network with images of the meeting participants taken by a web camera (web cam) and transferred over the network.
One fairly common device used in meetings is the conventional whiteboard that is written on during a meeting by the meeting participants. Alternately, an easel with a white paper pad is also used. Many meeting scenarios use a whiteboard extensively for brainstorming sessions, lectures, project planning meetings, patent disclosures, and so on. Note-taking and copying what is written on the board or paper often interferes with many participants' active contribution and involvement during these meetings. As a result, efforts have been undertaken to capture this written content in some automated fashion. One such method is via capturing an image of the written content. There are, however, issues with this approach to capturing the content of a whiteboard or paper document.
Although a typical lap top computer is sometimes equipped with a built-in camera, it is normally not possible to copy images of annotations of a fruitful brainstorming session on a whiteboard because the typical built-in laptop camera has a maximum resolution 640×480 pixels that is not high enough to produce a readable image of the whiteboard.
Likewise, in the distributed meeting scenario where a meeting participant has a document only in paper form to share with other remote meeting participants, a web cam, which typically has a maximum resolution of 640×480 pixels, is unable to produce a readable image of the paper document to provide to the other participants.
Hence, the current technology is lacking in capturing whiteboard or other document data for the above-mentioned scenarios, and many other similar types of situations.